The latest from our blogs
Under the Radar at the end of March
Firestoker is confirmed to present at Under The Radar.
We are honored to be in great company for our track, with Blogtronix, System One and BrainKeeper all presenting. This is a great lineup because, as far as I can see, we are all in the same space, but have very complimentary approaches and tools. I can see Firestoker integrating each of these tools in different ways.
We will most certainly be the newest startup presenting, and we have truly been “under the radar” with our development, but we relish the opportunity to show off the tool we have been using for our closed beta, and I expect some constructive feedback from the audience and judges.
I get in to SFO on Wednesday morning, but am pretty tied up with meetings in the SJC/PA/Menlo Park area mostly it seems on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday. Evenings are free, ping me!
We have been blogging
This blog has a lot of subscribers, so I thought I would give you an update on what we’ve been blogging about lately on our own blogs.
The Firestoker blog will soon become an aggregator of our own blogs on all things Enterprise 2.0. Thanks for hanging in.
Thomas Purves:
Wikinomics Book Launch
What’s a Wiki Good for?
Discovering Facebook
In conversation with Reid Conrad
The Imagination Challenge
Jevon MacDonald
Enterprise 2.0: Where do I start?
2007: The year of Enterprise 2.0?
Report: How can Enterprise 2.0 work right now?
What does the new customer see?
What I wish would happen in Enterprise 2.0 in 2007
Words and the distinctions they create
Manifesto for an Emerging Consultant Counter Culture: Why Change?
How do new organizations work?
The Manifesto for and Emerging Consultant Counter Culture
Blogging the Market
12 Elements of Great Managing, and useful software.
Enterprise2.0 Koolaid continues to gain drinkers
# Link: Scoble covering Enterprise/Office2.0 and connect beam. Excellent discussion follows.
# Rod Boothby of the site Innovation Creators has quit his gig with Ernst & Young to focus on Enterprise2.0 full time. Congrats Rod… what took you so long? 
ps, need a new job?
Knowledge Management vs Enterprise2.0 & Firestoker
Euan Semple on his blog has a mini round up on the current state the Knowledge Management movement. Naturally, he’s opinionated on the subject:
“Compare Dave Snowden’s eminently sensible and insightful analysis of the current state of KM with this load of complete bollocks.”
From the first link,
Now don’t get me wrong, the objectives of KM theory and practice persist and will continue to be of great importance. They are clear, simple and important and can be summarised as follows:
1. To support effective decision making
2. To create the conditions for innovationAll the methods and tools of KM from communities of practice to corporate taxonomies are subordinate to those two primary goals. In so far as the IT function supports those goals and continues to use the term KM then it will persist.
A lot of what is happening in the Enterprise 2.0 builds on these exact same objectives as Knowledge Management (Wikepedia link). The twist being that Enterprise2.0 takes the “social”-ish or emergent path rather than the more traditional top-down (as I understand them) methodologies of classic KM.
Euan’s early successes and experiments with introducing some very basic “social media” tools to the sprawling organization that is the BBC was one my own primary inspirations for embarking on the Firestoker project.
If you wan’t to know why… Here is Euan Semple at Lift06 - essential watching, for anyone interested in Enterprise20 or … how to 2.0-the-hell-out of KM
(from the opening line “knowledge management, does anyone even talk like that anymore?…”)
Here it goes - First Demo in the Wild
We will be demoing at DemoCamp Toronto 11 this coming Monday. We are probably going to demo two things:
- Our current version of the software.
- The beta of our upcoming version.
We will try to talk about why we decided to rebuild the tool and what sort of things we have learned from our initial set of customers, and how that impacted our new development.
We also plan to touch on a bit of the philosiphy behind what we are doing and we will probably walk through a small case study, but that is still TBD over supper on Sunday night.
So, if you want to get a glimpse into where we are going, drop by.
Enterprise 2.0 Night - Tom’s Slides
Tom will post more later, but here are his slides from Enterprise 2.0 Night at the Gladstone Hotel
Enterprise 2.0 Camp Tonight
Tonight Firestoker is sponsoring Enterprise 2.0 night at the Gladstone Hotel here in Toronto. The attendee list is filling up fast, so sign up in advance to be sure that you get in.
See you there.
Microsoft on Software as a Service
“Software as a Service (SaaS) has the potential to transform the way
information-technology (IT) departments relate to and even think about
their role as providers of computing services to the rest of the
enterprise. The emergence of SaaS as an effective software-delivery
mechanism creates an opportunity for IT departments to change their
focus from deploying and supporting applications to managing the
services that those applications provide. A successful service-centric
IT, in turn, directly produces more value for the business by providing
services that draw from both internal and external sources and align
closely with business goals.”
How to introduce social media tools in an organization
In my follow-up on the Office2.0 conference, I just remembered that I neglected to link to Chris Matthew’s excellent write up on one of the better blogs/wikis sessions. Chris rounds up of some of the tips and advice that were shared for how to encourage traction of the existing tools like wiki’s and blogs within the enterprise. These notes stem from the learning that simply giving users a blank page to start with is not likely to be sufficient to gain traction with these new tools. example tips:
Adoption tricks
1. Leave obvious errrrors in wikis, and then let people fix them. They’ll immediately see how it works.
2. Corporate blogs can grow fast if you hold content contests. Ask for anything, and then let the good stuff bubble up. And let the good stuff be determined by the users.
3. Find the connectors and experts in your office and get them involved. Think of the people that have networks within the company, and who are often consulted voluntarily.
One thing though, I believe Chris may have gotten backwards however, was his first sentence implying that social media reduces tacit interactions. In fact, I believe the value proposition for social media not about reducing, but rather accelerating and enabling more powerful tacit interactions. Tacit work is defined as all those decisions and actions that rely on experience, judgment and context rather then simple procedure or routine.
As more and more routine work in business is automated or outsourced, tacit work is becoming an ever larger and more important proportion of average daily working activity. Furthermore, I’d argue that the efficiency and execution of these test interactions become increasingly key to the competitiveness of both individual employees and the firm is a whole — and this is where “social” media has the potential to be transformative to enterprise.
More on this topic of Enterprise2.0 and Tacit interactions to come…
meanwhile read chris’ post here
Originally posted 2006-10-31, thomaspurves.com
We believe
We believe
. . . that smart people exist in every organization
. . . that the end of beaurocracy is in sight
. . . that conversations are the first truth
. . . that connected people are happy people
. . . that innovation is for everyone, big and small